Ask the 49er

Censoring reader comments on Daily49er.com?

An anonymous reader asked the 49er:

Why does the 49er censor comments?

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The Daily Forty-Niner says:

No one on the Daily Forty-Niner  staff censors comments, although it may occasionally seem like we do. What looks like censoring is actually the result of either automatic filtering by our website service provider or temporary glitches with the provider.

Daily49er.com uses College Publisher, which provides web services to college newspapers across the country.

College Publisher has a built in feature, which can only be changed on their side and not by any Forty-Niner staff member, that automatically filters comments and withholds from publication any containing profanity or web links. In order to ensure that all of these were to be made public, an editor would have to go through each and every comment to check if it is has been withheld from publication and OK it to go onto the site.

If any readers post comments that do not get published on the article page, they should try to post them a second time without any profanity or web links and see if they then appear on the page. If anyone feels that their comment(s) have been improperly withheld, we encourage them to send an e-mail with a description of what occurred to onlined49er@gmail.com

Additionally, College Publisher occasionally glitches and wipes all comments that have been posted during a certain period of time from daily49er.com. While this may seem like censorship, it is really just a temporary glitch that is not in any way caused by our staff. So far, the comments that have been wiped from the site have reappeared on daily49er.com. This has been a recent phenomenon, and our staff will be bringing it up with the service provider.

--Benjamin Zitney  

Is it OK to be barefoot on campus? It depends on where you are

An anonymous reader asked the 49er:

A girl in my class went barefoot today to raise awareness for this thing called Tom's Shoes. Can she do that? Don't we have to wear shoes in class?

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The Daily Forty-Niner says:

Along with other campus officials, Robert Quirk, the director of Facilities Management for CSULB, said that he knows of no specific campus-wide dress policy regarding students attending classes.

"I don't think it's been regulated to policy," Quirk said.

Quirk said campus dress code is a matter of social norms, except in certain cases where professors and departments require their students to come to class shoe-clad in order to avoid safety hazards.

Barbara Sasser, the Risk Manager for CSULB, confirmed this.

"There is no general requirement for the required attire in a classroom setting," she said. "The exception to this are laboratory settings, which would include fine arts studios."

One campus-goer who gladly comes to CSULB shoeless is "Barefoot" Ken Bob Saxton, who is an electronics technician for the College of Engineering. He has been working barefoot on campus since 1997.

"At first, I knew it was no problem, as I worked pretty much alone in my own workshop," Saxton said in an e-mail. "Then, one day, when the Dean of Engineering called me up to work on his computer, I thought to myself, 'Why put my shoes on?'"

Saxton said that, although the dean gave his feet a double-take, the dean had no problem with his bare feet.

"The administrative assistant even gave me a thumbs up," Saxton said.

He said he did wear sandals in the ceramics class labs as a student in the 1980s, where students were required to wear shoes.

Saxton said that when he goes off campus on business duties wearing shoes, "folks who know me, and see me with footwear, invariably ask, 'Why are you wearing shoes?'"

Saxton says you can learn about the Society for Barefoot Living at www.barefooters.org.

--Benjamin Zitney